Sky-high revenue, a multinational footprint, and all the resources that go along with such scale are not the only ways to measure a firm’s standing—especially with the people behind the business.
Each year, Fortune ranks dozens of small and medium-size companies based on their scores in surveys of their employees, administered and compiled by research and analytics firm Great Place to Work.
Small companies on this year’s list have fewer than 100 U.S. employees, while those in the medium category employ from 100 to 1,000. And there’s a close connection between these companies’ modest size and the positive experiences of those who work there.
GPTW polled nearly 127,000 employees for these rankings, and for each company selected, it collected an employee testimonial. Remarkably, 41 of the 150 statements include the word “everyone.” Sentiments such as “everyone’s ideas and opinions count” and “everyone roots for each other” permeate the list.
Others reference values that “every person” or “all employees” share. Some respondents even use the word “family” to describe their close-knit teams. No. 36 on the small-business list, dk Engineering of Walnut Creek, Calif., has the fewest employees of any ranked firm, at 18. “The company is more like a family than a corporation,” one dk employee says.
For all the comfort that a small organization affords, growth isn’t antithetical to a supportive culture. Four companies that were on the small list in 2018 have grown their headcount—and earned a place on the medium list in 2019.
See the full lists: the top 50 small workplaces and the top 100 medium workplaces.
A version of this article appears in the November 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Win Globally, Win Locally.”
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